A gathering place for my ideas, experiments, and writings

I will be adjuncting at Antioch College starting October 4 for the Fall 2016 quarter. I will be teaching the first class of SCI 270: Introduction to Programming with Python.

When I tell people that I will be adjuncting, their first question is usually if I have ever taught before. I have not! I have volunteered for Code.org a few times and I tutored math in college, but this is the first actual teaching gig.

I wanted to put up my work on using GL shaders for running cellular automata. I submitted my app EagleCell to Google Play. The app runs a fullscreen simulation of Conway’s Game of Life. The entire screen is copied into a GL texture, and that texture is rendered to a second texture through an “evolution” shader that runs a single step of the game. It also uses the RGBA components of each pixel as 4 separate cells and uses a heavily optimized evolution function.

ArsTechnica has a good article on the recent ruling on “Blurred Lines” sounding like “Got to Give It Up”.

I wonder if “Weird Al” will now ask Marvin Gaye’s estate for permission to perform “Word Crimes”.

This opportunity is as good as any to let people know about my SoundsLike database, a list of sounds that sound like other songs. I have been maintaining it for many years, but have just recently put it online. I will be updating it periodically.

Covers and samples are purposefully left out. You can find that anywhere else on the web. My goal with the SoundsLike database is to give answers to that question “What does this song sound like?”